Opinion: Democrats losing their advantage with women

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Tina Brown has been in and out of enough top jobs to fill a couple of careers and is currently treading water with her live events company, but she can still make headlines.

The former editor in chief of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Newsweek and the Daily Beast weighed in this week with a comment about how women may tip the midterm elections this year in favor of the Republicans because President Barack Obama makes them feel “unsafe.”

“I don’t think he makes them feel safe. I think they’re feeling unsafe,” Brown said of women voters on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. “They feel unsafe economically. They’re feeling unsafe with regard to ISIS. They’re feeling unsafe about Ebola. What they feel unsafe about is the government response to different crises.”

No stopping her now. The journalist who launched her career with the gossipy Tatler magazine in the U.K. went on to give her view of women’s perception of the president.

“I think that they’re beginning to feel a bit that Obama’s like that guy in the corner office,” she said, “you know, who’s too cool for school, calls a meeting, says this has to change, doesn’t put anything in place to make sure it does change, then it goes wrong and he’s blaming everybody.”

Her remarks keyed off a report in Politico making the argument that Obama’s declining standing with women will hurt Democrats in next month’s election and could decide several close races in favor of Republican candidates.

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Politico reporter Manu Raju looked at local polls in Alaska, Colorado, Kentucky, Iowa, New Hampshire and North Carolina, documenting that Obama’s support among women had declined significantly from his showing in the 2012 presidential election and in many cases was “underwater” — more women disapproving of his performance than approving.

Since Republicans generally have a strong lead among white male voters, the women’s vote is thought to be crucial to Democratic success in the election.

If Raju’s reporting identified the trend, it was Brown’s comments on feeling unsafe that brought it into sharp focus.

She went on to say that part of the disillusionment was also due to the “what have you done for me lately” feeling that women may have about the president, and the general mistrust voters feel about our political institutions.

In the current campaigns, Democrats belabor a putative “war on women” by Republicans that focuses on abortion and contraception, but these are “wedge issues” and not the “dominating factors” in women’s lives, Brown said.

Women are more concerned about things like fairness in pay and the lack of jobs for women, Brown said, as well as safety.

She found it telling that there was a “sigh of relief” when the Pentagon assigned a military task force to help contain the Ebola outbreak.

“The only institution left that we trust is the military,” Brown said.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Obama’s approval rating plunging to 40% among voters in general. Among women voters, it is only 39%, with 52% disapproving his performance as president (a gap that widened from 44-50 in the previous month). This contrasts with the 55-44 positive margin among women voters that Obama tallied in 2012 exit polls.

“Everyone understands now this is a more sophisticated public, period,” Brown said on MSNBC, and they are not happy with the performance of the government.

Brown acknowledges that Republicans, for their part, are doing “very little” for women, and blocked fairness in pay legislation four times.

That is only “partially right,” responds conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin, who believes that if Republicans embrace “reform conservatism,” a return to their roots of helping the middle and working classes, Americans, men and women both, will feel more secure.

One test case is Iowa, where Politico noted that the Republican candidate to replace retiring Democrat Tom Harkin in the Senate, Joni Ernst, has an 18-point advantage among men, while the Democratic candidate, Bruce Braley, leads by 13 points among women, according to a Quinnipiac poll.

The key in this analysis is that according to a recent Des Moines Register poll Obama is viewed unfavorably by 53% of women, even though he won 59% of the women’s vote in Iowa in 2012.

Fielding more women candidates is one of the ways Republicans have tried to correct the missteps in 2012, though it’s not certain that the gun-toting, motorcycle-riding image portrayed in Ernst’s ads will appeal to women.

But Braley’s move earlier this month to bring in First Lady Michelle Obama to campaign for him may not help, either.

One of Braley’s problems in the statewide race is name recognition and it didn’t help that Obama kept referring to him as “Bailey” instead of Braley, which earned them both a satirical takedown on The Colbert Report.

It remains to be seen whether Brown is right about how sophisticated voters are these days, but it seems certain enough that Democrats will not enjoy a decisive advantage among women voters that helped Barack Obama win two presidential elections.

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